He got a girl pregnant at 15 and failed his A-levels. So how did Matthew
Dunster conquer theatre?
Dominic Cavendish finds out.

'My motto,” says Matthew Dunster, “is 'Never come out of the same foxhole twice’.” How apt – you never quite know where the 42-year-old playwright and director is going to pop up next.

He has recently opened Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his own adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, at the Manchester Royal Exchange. The Most Incredible Thing, the Pet Shop Boys ballet based on Dunster’s version of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, returns to Sadler’s Wells this month. And in May, the Almeida will stage his new play, Children’s Children, during the run-up to which he will also be rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.

Dunster can act too, but with so many projects on the go – and one-year-old triplets at home in south London – he doesn’t have much time for it these days.

In an ideal world, he says, when we meet backstage at the Royal Exchange, he’d love to play Arthur Seaton, the brooding hero of Sillitoe’s novel, a character portrayed, unforgettably, by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s gritty 1962 film.

“I used to walk around the bathroom doing Finney’s voice,” admits Dunster. He’s thinks he’s not tall enough to play the role on stage, however, and besides has found the ideal actor in This Is England star Perry Fitzpatrick, whom he advised to steer clear of the film and make the role his own. “It’s in his bones,” he says.

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Yet for all his seriousness in conversation and sobriety of appearance – he’s bearded and bespectacled – there’s no mistaking the keen sense of identification Dunster feels with Seaton.

His teenage years in Oldham were unruly and almost ruinous. “I was at a rough comprehensive where you had a better time in terms of fun and a safer time in terms of peer pressure if you hid your intelligence,” he says. Growing up, he took a rather Seaton-esque view of life: “Everyone who comes into Arthur Seaton’s orbit is destroyed and then dismissed. I was guilty of that for a long time in my teens,” he says.

“If I cheated on someone, whether it was a friend or a girlfriend, that was just tough, because it was all part of my tortured journey.

“I scraped enough ­ O-levels to stay on, but failed all my A-levels,” he says, a failure he partly ascribes to the fallout from getting a girl pregnant when he was only 15. “There was no option of going to university.”

He kept his hand in doing youth drama while working for three years at North West Water’s debt recovery department. But if he hadn’t persevered with his hobby, going on to study drama, act and write, then the kind of deadening working-life faced by Seaton, whose horizons extend little beyond the Nottingham bike factory that employs him, could have been his too.

That his version makes a point of showing the grim personal attempt by Seaton and his married lover Brenda to abort their child – something not detailed in the film – suggests he’s particularly conscious of the hot water lads in his shoes would have ended up in a generation earlier.

Although times have changed, the factories have in many cases closed, and the communities around them wilted, Dunster believes the novel’s essential story is more relevant than ever: “When we looked at the elements of the system that Seaton was so angry with, each of those elements, apart from military service, have a much greater hold over all of us now. We’re shackled to our jobs and insurers. The employer and the government rule.”

Despite the scattershot nature of his work, that foxhole unpredictability, Dunster himself has picked up the scent of a pattern: “In terms of what I’m drawn to on a bigger scale, I’ve realised that the work is mainly about class.”

Even Children’s Children – which centres on two 55-year-old working-class actors living in London who’ve known success at different times? He smiles.

“I didn’t think that was what it was about until I read it back and I said:

'Oh, right, I’ve done it again!’” He sounds mock-resigned, but after a decade of British class being written-off as old-hat, you can tell he knows he’s on to something.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester (0161 833 9833) until April 8.Children’s Children is at the Almeida, London N1 (020 7359 4404), from May 17-June 30